All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and our next guest on the show today is Daphne Eviatar.
She is senior associate in Human Rights First's law and security program.
She investigates and reports on US national security policies and practices and their human rights implications.
She's written all over the place, including the Huffington Post where you can find an extensive archive.
The website is humanrightsfirst.org.
Welcome back to the show.
Daphne, how are you?
I'm doing well, Scott.
Thanks for having me.
How are you doing?
I'm doing great.
Appreciate you joining us today.
And now, so the big news this week is that the United Nations has put out a report about torture at the hands of the at least so-called Afghanistani government, their intelligence agencies, and their police.
Is that right?
That's right, yep.
And does the report not cover the army at all?
It doesn't talk about the army.
It talks about, and in Afghanistan, the different kinds of military and police forces are very divided.
But this report specifically looks at the intelligence services and at the police service.
OK, and then what did they find?
That torture is widespread, systematic, common.
They found that if they did a, they interviewed people who had been in these prisons and had been interrogated by NDS, which is, I'm sorry, NDS is the intelligence service, or the Afghan police.
With the intelligence service, half of the people they interviewed had been tortured.
With the police, one third of them had been tortured.
So this is a really widespread, systematic phenomenon.
Now, are we talking about harmless, loving, no-touch CIA-style torture, where they just drive you mad with drugs and sleep deprivation and freezing cold temperatures and burying you alive for a little while, or real torture?
Well, you know, I would say the CIA-type torture, which included waterboarding, of course, is real torture as well.
But the Afghans maybe don't do quite the same level of sophistication and have it designed the way the CIA did by their psychologists.
So the Afghans do it with beatings, beatings with electric cables, wires, wooden sticks, suspension upside down from the wall, electric shock, twisting of detainees' genitals, stress positions.
Things like that.
So they take it a little further than even the CIA does.
And now these are the people that America's fighting for.
This is the democracy.
These are the good guys.
Yeah, now, I mean, one of the really challenging things for the U.S. about this, of course, is that we fund so much of the Afghan government at this point.
And although we don't control the Afghan police and the NDS, we fund so much of that government that it's very hard to say that it's not actually U.S. funding that has gone to support some of this, indirectly at least, some of this activity.
So that makes it a huge challenge for the United States.
I mean, among other challenges.
So the CIA and the special operations guys are not embedded at the top levels with these agencies?
Well, of course, you know the United States would not say if they were.
But I think that it's not so much that they're embedded as that we have certainly been involved, there's no way that we don't work with them, right?
The United States, CIA, special forces clearly cooperate with the intelligence agencies.
They work with the Afghan police.
When I was in Afghanistan, I observed trials on the U.S. military base where the evidence came from the Afghan intelligence services.
So, and they were Afghan intelligence people there watching the trial.
And again, this was on the U.S. military base.
So there's a lot of cooperation going on there.
And that's necessarily the case because they're all trying to go after the same terrorist organizations and the Taliban and the same insurgent groups.
But it certainly raises the question of how much do the United States know that the NDS was using torture?
And this was something that certainly everybody has been saying that they use torture for many years.
It's not really a new allegation.
This is just the first time it was documented in this extensive way.
So it does raise the question of, is the U.S. complicit in some way if it knew this was going on or if it's been funding these agencies in the Afghan government?
Well, it seems like we'd have to assume that they're just working hand in glove.
I mean, this is our beachy government or, sorry for the prejudicial term there or whatever, but these are our sock puppets.
This is the land under occupation.
How could there be a line of responsibility that separates our guys from theirs at that level?
I mean, the difficulty is to some extent the U.S. really tries to maintain some separation.
And so, for example, when the U.S. military picks someone up, they detain someone, they put them in the U.S. military prison.
They don't turn them over to the Afghans to put in the Afghan prison.
And part of the reason, at least, seemed to be because they knew that there was torture going on.
Whereas the international forces, the NATO forces, the U.S. is a part of the NATO force, but it also has its own separate forces.
The NATO forces did turn people directly over to the Afghans who were then handing them over to the intelligence agencies where they were being tortured.
So it's difficult.
You know, on the one hand, like, yes, we're operating in a society where this has been a problem for a very long time, and the U.S. is trying in some ways to separate itself from that, but it can't completely separate itself from that.
Well, and it seems like if they, if the Afghan police or intelligence services torture any of their victims into claiming to be somebody important, then they get turned over to the CIA or the military, the Americans, right?
Well, I mean, that's not supposed to be the way it works.
I can't say who gets turned over to the CIA, but the way it works is that if the U.S. picks someone up, they will interrogate them.
If they think they're not important, they might turn them over to the Afghans, eventually for trial, right?
If the U.N. picks them up, the NATO force, I'm sorry, not the U.N., the NATO forces, if they pick them up, they'll turn them over to the Afghans.
The Afghans are not supposed to turn them, to pick up people and turn them over to the U.S., but on the other hand, you have the Afghan military working with the U.S. military, going out and doing these night raids and arresting people, and they work hand in glove.
Now, whether the intelligence services are informing what they're doing as well, I don't know, but certainly that could be the case.
I'm talking with Daphne Eviatar from Human Rights First, humanrightsfirst.org.
It's the website.
Afghanistan Torture Report raises questions for U.S. government.
One of mine is, when you say, I think you said, what, a third in police custody and a half in intelligence service custody say that they're tortured, is that right?
Yeah, yeah.
And now, can you give us some raw numbers of totals of how many people we're talking about undergoing this treatment?
Well, this is only based on the U.N. report and the number of people that they interviewed.
So they found, I think they interviewed 273 detainees who had been in NDS detention, and 125 of them said they'd been tortured.
And in terms of the police, I don't have that number in front of me, but it was a few hundred more.
Let me see, I think, yeah, sorry, I don't have that number right in front of me, but it was a few hundred others.
So we're talking about, but these were a sampling.
The idea wasn't that they interviewed everybody, but that they interviewed sort of a cross-section.
So they interviewed 324 security-related detainees total.
If we thought it was scientific enough to extrapolate out those numbers, do you know, ballpark, how many people are arrested by the security services and the intelligence services there in a given year?
Anything like that?
Well, certainly thousands.
I mean, the U.S. itself is holding more than 2,600 detainees in our prisons, and that's a tiny fraction of the number of Afghans that are in custody in Afghanistan.
So we could be talking about tens of thousands of people would be my estimate.
Well, and now the Taliban, if I remember back in the 90s and the early 2000s when they were still in power there, they were accused of throwing women down the well and throwing stones at people for no good reason and stuff like that.
But were they torturers?
I mean, there's at least one American POW, I think, who's been held by them for more than a year, a couple of years now, maybe, but at least last time they put out a video, it didn't seem like they were torturing him.
Yeah, I don't know whether the Taliban actually torture them.
There are moral equivalents and all that, but you know.
Yeah, it's kind of hard.
You know, the Taliban don't treat people very well either, and they blow a lot of innocent people up a lot too.
So I certainly wouldn't hold them up as the standard, but you might be right that they don't actually torture their prisoners, but they just kind of torture people they think are doing things wrong as punishment.
But yeah, they're not exactly the model of civility either.
Yeah, well, I wasn't really saying that so much as just how do we compare to these guys who are known to be, you know, the world's worst monsters, supposedly.
But anyway, we'll be right back.
It's Daphne Eviatar from Human Rights First.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Daphne Eviatar from Human Rights First.
As 10-year Afghanistan anniversary approaches, Bagram detainees still without due process.
This one headline here, the other subject of our discussion a minute ago before the break.
Afghanistan torture report raises questions for U.S. government officials.
Questions for U.S. government.
And I'm sorry, Daphne, I didn't mean to screw up and put you on the spot like that.
I wasn't trying to say the Taliban are better than us, just that we're as bad or worse than them is all.
I don't think that's to their credit.
Yeah, yeah, no, I know you're not trying to get the Taliban credit, and you're right, you're making that point.
But I do hold Barack Obama 100% responsible for every action that the Karzai government or any of his agents take.
I mean, it's up to Barack Obama whether General Dostum is the head of the military over there or not, et cetera, et cetera, like that.
I mean, he's the emperor here, not them.
Well, here's the difficulty.
I mean, I think that the U.S. government has tried and necessarily they're kind of trying to help the Karzai government without controlling it.
And they really can't control it in a sense because that'll just backfire on us.
But on the other hand, we are propping up the government, as you point out, and we have a lot of influence over them and we give them a lot of money.
And so it means our fingerprints are kind of all over everything that happens there.
So what does it mean when the NDS, when the Afghan intelligence is torturing people and we know it?
To the U.S. government, it's saying, well, now we're gonna put in this monitoring system and we're gonna train them better.
But they've known for a long time that this has been going on.
And why has it taken so long to put in a monitoring system and how rigorous is that gonna be?
And the big problem I have with the U.S. military operations there, I mean, among many of the concerns about it, is the incredible amount of secrecy.
So we don't even know, like, what do they do to monitor to make sure people aren't being tortured?
They don't say, they don't talk about it.
They won't even tell you how many prisoners that the U.S. is holding over there.
When I try to ask for more information about the prisoners that the U.S. is holding, we know that now that there are 2,600, at least as of a couple of months ago, because Lindsey Graham came out and made that point, but the U.S. government doesn't talk about them, they won't give you the names, they won't confirm or deny who's there or why they're there, they won't talk about, you know, they're expanding the prison now, they're planning to double the size so it'll be able to hold more than 5,000 prisoners.
And at the same time, they're saying, well, we're gonna withdraw our troops, so are we gonna just turn those prisoners over to the Afghans and then they're gonna be tortured?
Or what's gonna happen?
And, you know, this was a big problem in Iraq as well.
So it raises a lot of concerns.
We're collecting thousands of prisoners now.
And what are we as, we meaning the U.S. government, what is the U.S. government gonna do with them when it leaves?
Well, and the question remains what they're doing with them right now.
I mean, it makes sense to me that there's less rules and regulations governing the methods that Afghan intelligence guys are under when they're torturing somebody.
But under the U.S. Army Field Manual, they're still torturing people at Bagram, are they not?
Well, we don't have evidence that people are being tortured at Bagram, no.
I mean, I can't say that.
We do know that there is a part of Bagram where they put them in usually for a couple of weeks.
But again, it's very secret.
They call it a classified screening facility.
We don't know what goes on there.
People that I've spoken to who were there, who I interviewed, who were held there, they didn't, within the last couple of years at least, they did not describe being tortured.
They described being sort of, you know, not very well treated.
The conditions are difficult.
The light is on all the time.
Often they're not able to sleep.
You know, they can be interrogated in the middle of the night.
So there's questions about whether they're being intentionally sleep deprived.
But it's not like it used to be where they're actually being beaten and people were beaten to death and people were tortured to death.
That was earlier on.
I don't have evidence that that's happening right now.
And now, but you're not talking about the regular Bagram prison.
You're talking about the special JSOC prison.
Right, that's within the Bagram prison.
Right, they built this new facility that's nicer called Parwan, where it just means that it's not quite as crowded and the conditions are a little bit better and they get real food instead of like the sort of dry military meals that they get in the screening facilities.
But they, but now they're expanding that prison.
So again, it raises this question, how long is the US planning to hold prisoners there?
And as we've talked about before, those prisoners don't get trials.
They don't get lawyers.
They don't really have an opportunity to defend themselves and there are no charges brought against them.
So it's, again, this very secret system of we don't know who really deserves to be there, who's guilty or who's innocent, but the US is collecting thousands of people that it's holding there.
And now, to what degree is this the made up kind of ad hoc rules for warfare that are the legacy of the post 9-11 era here, or to what degree, maybe better phrased, to what degree have they gone back toward adopting the international norms and their own military traditions for how they treat arrested prisoners of war or whatever it is that they're calling these people now?
Yeah, unfortunately, they're not going back.
This is a totally new paradigm post 9-11.
So none of these are considered prisoners of war.
They're not entitled to the, what the Geneva Conventions would give them.
I mean, they're entitled to sort of the minimum basic humane treatment.
This is according to the US government.
But the US government says that the other international human rights laws, which would give them a right to due process, to an opportunity to defend themselves, that that doesn't apply.
They just say it doesn't apply abroad.
And it doesn't apply to prisoners who are not traditional prisoners because they're members of insurgent groups.
So the US basically says there are no laws that apply to them.
And so it's just kind of this ad hoc thing.
And every year or two, they change the procedure a little.
They say, okay, now we're gonna give you a hearing and you're allowed to make a statement, but you still don't have a right to see the evidence against you.
You don't have the right to a lawyer.
You don't have the right to actually have somebody go research your case on your behalf or bring in witnesses.
So the system really hasn't improved much at all.
Well, it seems like I could see Americans tolerating this for a little while that, you know, hey, it's an emergency and they attacked us and we have to go do this real quick.
And I guess if Donald Rumsfeld says they just don't have time to give these people a real hearing at all, then he must be right or something.
But now it's a decade later.
And this just goes on and on where these people have single branch process for whether they're ever released or not.
Yeah, I mean, that's what is kind of incredible about it.
If at the beginning you realize, okay, we were maybe we were in this chaos and we went to war in Afghanistan right after the September 11th attacks.
And we thought, okay, so temporarily we have to hold them.
But now it's been 10 years.
Now it's been institutionalized.
Yeah, not that that's right, but at least it's, you know, a tolerable premise.
It makes sense that someone could conclude that, you know, it's reasonable.
Right, but now to continue it on and now it's become this systematic process.
And Congress wants now is now considering passing a law that would make indefinite detention a permanent part of the United States justice system or not justice system of the military system.
It would allow military detention of any suspected terrorist.
So this is becoming a much more permanent feature of the American legal and military landscape.
And that's a real problem because as you said, and as we've talked about before, this is indefinite detention without charge or trial.
This sort of the antithesis of what America is supposed to be about.
Well, and, you know, as you pointed out on the Human Rights First website today, regular court process for a terrorist like Abdulmutallab is perfectly fine for getting a conviction done.
Works every time pretty much, doesn't it?
It sure does.
I mean, you know, they went to trial.
The trial started, I think, yesterday.
And then today he pled guilty.
This happens constantly.
And not only that, but, you know, you have this guy who was just picked up for supposedly cooperating with Iran, who was planning to bomb some embassies in Washington, provided all sorts of information already, kept waiving his rights to a lawyer or to remain silent.
These guys, you know, the FBI knows how to work with them, and they engage them and they convince them to cooperate.
And they provide incredible amounts of information, which is how we get the next guy and the next guy.
And, you know, so the FBI is really good at foiling these plots before they happen.
And so there's really no need to kind of create a whole new system of military detention and military trials and military tribunals at Gitmo and in Afghanistan in order to stop terrorism.
You don't need to create a whole other military bureaucracy to stop terrorism when we already know how to do it in the federal justice system.
Yeah, well, it's just amazing that, you know, for example, in Afghanistan, the way the prison system goes on there, where is it, I mean, I guess this is fanciful.
I'm not saying it's a plausible thing, but just technically speaking, if the Pashtun tribes just said, we're Pashtunistan now, and we want to sign the Geneva Convention and you have to, you know, go by it or whatever, that's really, you know, the loophole that they need to jump through in order to officially delegitimize what America's doing here.
Is that basically it?
That they're just tribesmen so we can do what we want with them because they haven't signed up for the same laws we have.
Well, kind of, yeah.
In a way, what we're saying is, I mean, the problem is you have these different kind of tribes within the government that don't necessarily agree to being run by that government.
Although the Taliban were signatories back before the regime change, right?
Signatories to the Geneva Convention?
Yeah.
Weren't they?
I don't know, actually.
I don't think they follow them if they were.
Right, well, one day we'll get our hands on all these memos and see how close the Obama teams are to John Hughes and Jay Bivey's, but we're all out of time for now.
Thanks very much for yours.
Daphne Eviatar, everybody, humanrightsfirst.org.
Thank you.
Thanks so much, Scott.
